Symposium Voice Ports 1

[RichardStones]

We are currently using Symposium release 3.0 I on my BT Horizon stats I seem to be getting a large number of Ring Tone No Reply calls.

When I have tried dialling my 0845 numbers and make a selection, it can sometimes take 8 / 9 rings before I either get put in a queue at the site and hear the "You are in a Queue" message or I am played a busy message. Obviously customers are hanging up listening to ringing hence my BT Horizon stats.

This does only happen when we are very busy.

I was told this is something to do with the capacity of a network card on one of the Symposium Voice Ports. Is this correct??

 

[sandyml]

What kind of voice ports are you using? IVR or ACCESS? Or even worse, RANs. It sounds like when you are very busy, so are all your ports. Try running a report on your IVR ports during your busy intervals, and look at average speed of answer. If it approaches 4 seconds, you are in trouble. If you can, try using ACCESS ports and GIVE CONTROLLED BROADCAST (so that you can group up to 50 people on that initial message). You might also want to try GIVE MUSIC before the 1st announcement plays -- that way, callers will hear something other than ringing.

 

[RichardStones]

Symposium is all new to me so you'll have to forgive my lack of knowledge.

Not sure whether we are using IVR, Access or RAN's. How can I tell?? My gut feeling is RAN's.

I did run a report as you suggested, but it was called an
IVR Queue Statistics Report. It told me that the calls not treated at 9am for the selected day at 9am was 95. Also the not treated delay between 9am - 11am was 1hr 25 mins.

Does this mean anything? I don't know what Symposium classes untreated calls as and what the delay refers to.

 

[sandyml]

Ouch!
Well, you might be using a combination of RANs, IVR, and/or ACCESS. If you can check your scripts (or have someone do it for you and print them out), look for GIVE RAN, GIVE IVR, and OPEN VOICE SESSION or GIVE CONTROLLED BROADCAST commands. The "voice session" and "controlled broadcast" ones are ACCESS. The IVR Queue Statistics Report doesn't include RANs.
Do you have a Symposium Call Center Server (SCCS) or a Symposium Express? If the latter, then you may also have a VPS card, which provides the ports for your recordings. If its a SCCS, then you probably have either Meridian Mail or Call Pilot. Let me know what you're using, I'll try to add to this.

 

[RichardStones]

sandyml,

We have a SCCS version 3.0 and I'm 99% sure its Meridian Mail. That's only because I've heard our IT Services guy mention this to me before.

Hope this helps.

 

[sandyml]

OK. Now, can you find out how many ports you have from that IT guy? You may have some extra Meridian Mail regular ports that can be reconfigured and added to your Symposium ports. Also, look at the back of your Symposium server -- do you see a serial cable coming from COM 2? That is required for ACCESS ports. Looking at the configuration of the ports in either Meridian Mail or Symposium (client) will reveal their nature, IVR or ACCESS. ACCESS will give you better utilization, but if you aren't currently using them, would require configuration changes, perhaps hardware, and certainly script rewrite. If you're already using ACCESS, adding ports to that group isn't so bad. Let me know..

 

[RichardStones]

Still awaiting confirmation from our IT people on the number of ports, however I've had confirmation that we are in fact using Access voice ports.

When I ran the IVR Queue Statistics report as per the above note, what does it class as not treated and the not treated delay??

Also in terms of how many voice ports we should have, is there a rule of thumb or does it go on the number of lines you have into the building or the maximum calls you are likely to see in the queue etc etc????

 

[sandyml]

Generally speaking, you are looking at a 4-second timeout. As for how many ports you need, that is a result of your call rate, number of announcements, how long they are, are there "mandatory" first announcements, etc. If you use your ports to solicit input from callers (select 1 for this, etc.), you are likely to tie your ports up for a much longer time. You might also have some ports that have dropped out of synch, and aren't actually working at all, reducing the number of ports.